Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  “Wait a minute, what’s today?” Garth asked. “The fifth?”

  “No, the sixth,” Mick said.

  “The sixth. Yeah, that means it’s a full moon.”

  “Excuse me,” I asked, “how do you know that?”

  He looked at me, surprised.

  “The Weather Channel.”

  “You watch the Weather Channel?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ve got to know when to cut your weeds. There’s a certain weed that if you cut it on the day before the full moon, it’s never supposed to grow back.”

  “What weed is that?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t grow up with this stuff. It’s that weed that makes cow’s milk sour. What’s it called, Mick?”

  Mick supplied the answer.

  “Yeah, that’s right. That one.” He wanted to know the name, but didn’t. He took a second to commit it to memory. And for the first time I caught a glimpse of Garth’s insecure private side. Garth’s little-boy persona—the side of him that tried so hard to be an authentic Wild West figure—was real. Unlike most couch cowboys, content to sit around the house watching Westerns and deluding themselves they could ride that well if they tried, Garth actually did leave the pavement. He’d even gone so far, I learned later, to set up a toy steer behind his house so he could practice roping. In many ways, this dedication was almost endearing: Garth Brooks had sold more records than any man in American history, but he was still upset that he didn’t know how to weed.

  “I sing about cowboys,” he explained. “I try to get as true as I can. But I ain’t trying to hang out with those guys in Wyoming who make a living cowboying because I can’t. I’m a guy who owns some acreage; enjoys planting his hay; enjoys horseback riding, even though he’s got a horse that protects him because he’s not any good; enjoys roping, though he’s not worth a shit at it…I can talk now about the difference between a no-till drill and a cultipacker. I can do that. But can I tell the difference between a Thoroughbred, a quarter horse, and a saddle pony by looking at them? No. So I got a lot of learning to do.”

  And that desire to be something else proved to be central to his identity. Though he may not have been to the Ponderosa born, he had, in a way, done even better. Through his music, his manners, and his let’s-all-study-the-Farmers’-Almanac rallying cry, he had created a new icon in American life: the suburban cowboy. In the process, he’d given meaning to millions of baby boomers who’d never seen the inside of a cattle pen. You can be born on a cul-de-sac and still have feelings; you can run around on shag carpet as a child and still claim your birthright on the frontier. Garth spoke to this group because he was so clearly one of them. Indeed, American suburbs were full of millions of middle-age, middle-class, college advertising majors like him. In one of his most successful songs, “Unanswered Prayers,” a man returns to a hometown football game with his wife, where together they run into his high school flame. Just as the man begins to regret having lost the girlfriend and the song risks becoming a cliché, he realizes that the old girlfriend is not as lovely as he had remembered. “And as she walked away / I looked at my wife / And then and there I thanked the good Lord / For the gifts in my life.”

  By addressing aging boomers, Garth Brooks became their patron saint. He also rounded out a process that had been under way since the birth of the Grand Ole Opry. In the first half of this century, country music had given voice to the migration of rural Americans to the city. Now country captured their migration away from the cities and into the suburbs (by 1990, 50 percent of Americans were living in suburbs; by contrast, only 12 percent of Americans were living in cities of 500,000 or more). More than any other musical figure, Garth recognized this transition—from escaping rural life via Route 66 to returning via I-40—then let the rest of the world in on the secret: I too liked raising hell and listening to rock ‘n’ roll when I was younger, but now that I’m older, I want to ride horses and raise my family. Instead of “country comes to town,” a much more limited ideal that has embodied many of Nashville’s stars of the past, Garth Brooks embodied the opposite: He was town gone back to country.

  And even then he felt not quite there.

  “So is your farm a working one?” I asked Garth as we drove into the city.

  “No, not yet. We’d like to make it that way, but I haven’t made enough money to lose that much.”

  “So what do you want to have. Cattle? Crops.”

  “Well…” He seemed suddenly anguished here. “I’d like to have cattle, but I wouldn’t want to kill them or use them for food. That would bother me. But Sandy really, really wants to have calves, and that’s the only way to do it.”

  (Later Sandy would tell me a story. They were sitting around the house one afternoon when a skunk wandered into the backyard. Knowing skunks are nocturnal, Sandy assumed it must be rabid and sent Garth to kill it. He crept closer to the skunk, getting to within ten feet, then turned away, letting the skunk escape. Sandy had been watching. “I didn’t hear the gun go off,” she said when he returned. “Oh, he ran into the thingy,” Garth said. Sandy knew better. “The man had ten chances to shoot that stupid skunk,” she told me, “but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Whereas a cowboy would just go ahead and do it, Garth couldn’t. As badly as he wants to be tough, he just never will be. He’s still a mama’s boy.”)

  “What do you mean it would bother you?” I asked Garth.

  “Just the whole idea of killing a cow bothers me.” He launched into a story. “Just the other month, a friend of mine called me. It was a Sunday, I think. Yeah, that’s right. A Sunday. Three weeks into football season.” Like a good storyteller, he grew increasingly animated as he remembered each detail. He leaned forward in his seat. His eyes came alive. Suddenly I could see the little boy, the youngest of six children, trying to get attention around the dinner table or at the regular family gatherings called “Funny Nights” at which each child performed for the others. It was at those nights that Garth Brooks, the entertainer, was born.

  “It was just starting to get cold,” he continued. “Sandy said she was going to take the girls out to the zoo. They went, and I looked around the house and thought, ‘Oh, my God. It’s a Sunday. I have the place to myself, and it’s the first chance I have had all year to watch football.’ So I stripped down to my underwear, grabbed a bag of chips, and plopped down with the remote in front of the TV. And just then the phone rang. Brrrrring.” (He actually made the sound.) “It was a buddy of mine. He said he had a cow down in a ravine. Would I come help pull it out? So of course I called Mick.” He chuckled. “We went down there. The cow was down in the mud and we tried and tried to get her out of there. We couldn’t do it. He thought we might have to kill it.”

  “So how do you kill a cow?” I asked. We’d arrived at the hotel by now and had descended into the lobby. Garth looked out of place in high school locker room duds. He was already running late for his interview with Larry King.

  “I don’t know, shoot it between the eyes, I guess. But that’s the point, I didn’t know what to do. And I was really nervous. I thought, ‘He’s not going to ask me to kill the cow, is he?’ And then I realized he didn’t know how to kill her either. He’d never done it, and he’d been around ranches his whole life. That didn’t make me feel so bad.”

  Eventually they tied a rope around her legs, attached the rope to a tractor, and pulled her out of the ravine. Though her legs eventually gave way, they didn’t have to kill her.

  “The thing was,” he said, “I thought it would take about an hour or so. It took three or four. I still haven’t had a chance to watch football all year.”

  With his story finished, Garth excused himself to go change. When he returned, an hour later, his face was cleanly shaven. He was wearing black jeans, black boots, and a blue-and-black shirt he had designed himself. He also wore his hat. The insecure farmer of an hour earlier had been transformed into a poised professional. If music
was a sport, this was his game face. Now he had work to do. Now he had an interview to give. The change was startling. Suddenly people turned their heads. Suddenly he had more strut to his step. Suddenly he had that determined twinkle in his eye. “Showtime,” he said and strode out the door.

  SIX

  THE COVER

  The early morning temperature had barely crept above twenty when Wade Hayes pulled a pair of starched blue jeans off a hanger in an unheated cabin on a dude ranch north of Nashville. The jeans, a midnight blue, had been pressed so tightly they looked as if they could cut through ice. A layer of ice had, in fact, collected on the splintery panes of glass in the makeshift dressing room where Wade was about to crack open the jeans and scrape them onto his six-foot-two frame. Before he did that, a young woman from his record label, dressed in a parka and purple gloves, darted into the wobbly walled room and turned on a portable hair dryer in a valiant effort to heat up the space. She was several seconds into her huffing and puffing when the whirring of the dryer blew a fuse in the generator, instantly plunging the cabin into darkness, silencing the kerosene heater in the corner, and eliciting a howl from the photographer’s assistant, who, at that moment, was hanging a klieg light from the ceiling and was forced to let it come crashing to the ground to keep it from smashing his head.

  “Get me some light!” called the frantic assistant.

  “Turn off that dryer!” shouted the bewildered wardrobe lady.

  “Good God! My camera!” exclaimed the photographer.

  All through the commotion, the marketing rep from the label was still staring at Wade’s unflappable pants. “Honey, I hope you don’t get a hard-on in there,” she said.

  All Wade could do was laugh.

  With his new album now complete, though two months behind schedule (they had trouble finding “up-tempo” songs), Wade’s attention now turned to shooting the photograph that would grace the album’s cover. In addition to appearing on the front of the album, the photos from this single sixteen-hour session would also land on all his tour jackets, T-shirts, key chains, bandannas, coffee mugs, guitar picks, and, perhaps, even on the side of his bus, as they stopped his life and froze his face in time, thereby defining his image for the next several years of his career. The pressure to get it right—and fast—was an important, albeit onerous, responsibility for a young artist still so overwhelmed by his new life that he remained uncomfortable with the idea of his face on hundreds of thousands of CDs, not to mention billboards, magazines, and tabloids (not yet, but they were looking).

  “There’s just a lot of things about my looks that I don’t like,” Wade said of his handsome but deeply serious face, with its heavy eyebrows, a high school football-player-type smirk (I am tough despite my tender appearance!), and, yes, globby misshapen nose that looked like a piece of putty between a pair of brooding eyes. “I broke my nose twice,” he explained. “Once in grade school when I was fighting, and the other time when I fell off a trampoline when I was thirteen. To this day, there’s only a few pictures I can even stand to look at.” So why not get plastic surgery? I asked. “I’m afraid it would change my voice.”

  Given his anxiety, the task of shooting Wade was even more difficult. The person charged with meeting the task was a man so seemingly different from Wade, as well as Nashville in general, that his anxious stoop in the corner that morning, smoking, hurrying, with stringy gray hair, added a degree of almost droll relief to an otherwise frigid situation. “Okay,” Bill Johnson said in his raspy voice once the generator had been restarted. “I’d like to get a rainbow effect through that window. Give him a little more glow this time.”

  Bill Johnson grew up in Yankton, South Dakota, attended art school in Omaha, and moved to San Francisco during the Age of Aquarius to become a painter, “which I did until I went broke.” Eventually ending up at the start-up publication Rolling Stone, he moved with the magazine to New York, then left to follow a fellow designer, Virginia Team, to Nashville in the late 1970s. Since that time, as senior creative director for Sony Music, he had worked on album covers for artists as varied as Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton and, along the way, had won two Grammy Awards: one for his work with Rosanne Cash, the other with the O’Kanes. “The shoots are a lot more complicated now,” he said of the industry’s new high-gloss style, a far cry from the early days of country music when artists followed the Victorian ideal by sitting for portraits in their Sunday best and grimly staring at the camera. Even in the 1970s, when blue jeans and open collars first started appearing in country music photographs, image was an afterthought. “It used to be that George Tones would walk in in whatever he was wearing, with a bottle of whiskey in his back pocket. He wouldn’t even call a break. He’d just turn around and pull out his bottle, we’d continue shooting, and there he’d be again, just smiling away. You never really knew what you were gonna get, but you did get something every time.”

  Now, shooting a cover for Wade Hayes required at least two months of planning with his management to ensure that Wade would have half a day off among tour dates in Tuscaloosa, Pontiac, and Walla Walla; six weeks of meetings on wardrobe, setting, lighting, and facial expression; and one month of traipsing all over the state or, in some cases, the country, looking for the place, with the light and the aura, that would make the artist feel comfortable and give him the confidence to smile into the camera for that one indescribable moment. Then, on the day that moment arrived, a team of two dozen attendants had to trek out to the location: one photographer, three assistants, a lighting expert, a wardrobe lady, a marketing executive, two secretaries, an intern, the label’s publicist, the artist’s publicist, the artist’s manager, the manager’s deputy, their assistant, a caterer, a coffee lady, the art director, the artist, his roommate, and, though she was running late on this day, the hair-and-makeup artist, Melanie, whose psychic told her not to drive too early for fear that she’d wreck her car on the ice. “My psychic is the one who told me to come to Nashville in the first place,” she whispered as Wade finished tying his ropers. “She said it’s like Mr. Creative down here. And you know what? She was right. I’ll never go back to New York or L.A. And Paris? Who needs the prima donnas?”

  Wade, though he looked handsome when he emerged in his military-crisp jeans, ocean blue cowboy shirt, and sly hint of white T-shirt, had none of the sexual predator feel that dominates fashion runways. That was no accident. “In New York, the focus is on beauty and fashion,” Melanie explained. “It’s got to be, like, totally forward. Totally next. Aggressive. In Nashville, you’re dealing with the country market and with fans who want to see the real thing. What we do is make our artists look beautiful, but also keep them as close to themselves as possible. Why do you think country artists all have their pictures on their album covers, while rock artists have abstract photographs or concept art? In country, it’s all about identifying with the artist.”

  As Wade sat down in his first setup of the day, a kitchen chair in front of a morning window, he did appear eminently identifiable, a lanky kid brother with few trappings of stardom. If anything, he could have used a little more sparkle. Tamara, the photographer, sent an assistant to adjust the light so it covered only half his face as he peered out the window. Bill, who was supervising, sent another aide outside to tinker with the umbrella that shielded the sun. Melanie, meanwhile, spritzed gel onto his hair, while Marcia, the marketing hand, stood behind the camera trying to get an early morning rise out of Wade.

  “Come on, honey, livelier!” she cooed once the shooting started and Wade started moving through poses—looking out the window, down at the floor, up at the ceiling, directly into the lens. “That’s right, baby. Give it to me. Look me right into the store.” Wade, busy concentrating, showed little emotion. “Think of multimillion albums,” Marcia continued. “Think of naked girls throwing themselves on the stage.” The room chuckled a bit. Wade cracked a grin. “Don’t stop!” she pleaded. “You’re almost there. Just imagine: Albums. Girls. Albums. Girls—” And
then, out of nowhere, she got what she wanted: a bounce of the eyebrows, a sliver of a dimple, and, finally, (could it be?) a wide-toothed smile. “He smiles!” she shouted. “He smiles! He smiles!” She raised her hands like an Olympian—“Yes!”—then sprinted over and gave him a kiss.

  From the moment he entered the business, Wade Hayes seemed to embody many of the tensions straining contemporary country music—between youth and maturity, between sexuality and temperance, between wearing a hat and not. As a result, a year into his career, the question of what direction to take his image was already testing his camp.

  By the time Wade’s debut single, “Old Enough to Know Better (But Still Too Young to Care),” was released in October 1994, country music had experienced a drastic revolution in the five years since Garth made his debut. The revolution had to do with the size—and the makeup—of the audience. Traditionally country had appealed to older fans. Indeed, the genre’s growth in the 1990s, led by the so-called Class of ’89 (including Garth, Clint Black, Alan Jackson, Mary Chapin Carpenter) was fed in no small measure by a demographic accident. By 1989, the leading edge of the baby boom was just reaching forty, and it was these people who first reached out to Nashville. “Country music is about lyric-oriented songs with adult themes,” Lon Helton, the country editor of Radio & Records (R&R), told me. “You’ve probably got to be twenty-four or twenty-five to even understand a country song. Life has to slap you around a little bit, and then you go: ‘Now I get what they’re singing about.’ As those people aged, they came right into the wheelhouse of country music.” According to the Country Music Association, half of country music fans in the first half of the 1990s were in their thirties and forties.

  As the music caught on, though, and more stars started appearing on television, younger people started taking notice. According to R&R, the percentage of country fans in their teens tripled in the nineties; the percentage between eighteen and twenty-four increased by half. Suddenly 40 percent of Americans in their twenties said they were country music fans. More than any other mark of the Country Era, the arrival of young people represented the biggest change. “When I first started in country radio back in 1971,” Lon Helton told me, “you had to convince people that country music didn’t cause cancer. Their opinion wasn’t neutral; it was openly negative. Now for the first time ever we’ve gone from having a whole generation of people having a negative view to one with a positive view. We didn’t even go through neutral—went right to positive.” A principal spur in this transition was the introduction of videos. “You want to know why country music got so big?” Hazel once said to me in her Grandma-told-you-so tone. “All those sexy videos. Women fantasize as much as guys do. When they see a Vince Gill video, or a Clint Black, or a Wade Hayes—‘Oooh!’—they are going to fantasize about that guy when ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.’” Country videos received an enormous boost in 1991 when TNN launched Country Music Television. Almost overnight the appearance of artists began to matter more: gone were the receding hairlines and sagging wrinkles of older stars like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, replaced with skintight jeans, powder-keg dimples, and a sudden rampant swagger of the hips not seen since Elvis Presley.